Homelight

Homelight is the 14th poetry collection from Lola Haskins, past winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, two Florida Book Awards, two NEA fellowships, and other honors. As late work sometimes does, Homelight has a broad reach. In the first section, "On the Shoulders of Giants," Haskins remembers poets who preceded her, Sappho to Blake to Merwin. After lingering to consider a Michelangelo drawing, she moves on to birds in "Wings." Then, in "And They Are Gone" and "(In)humanity," she turns to the arrogance of the way we treat the planet and each other. A pause for "Corona," then on to love, both bad and good, in "The Slapped Girl." The final section, "Rehearsing," considers death, in the form of tributes to lost friends and her own preparations to follow them. There is humor here, lyricism and epic sweeps, and, almost at the end, these lines to a lover: "I wear you under my clothes the way a Sikh wears his cord, / in token of the ineffable beauty of the world," which - as Merwin, who praised her work, would have seen immediately - might as well have been addressed to poetry itself.